69.034 Brown Matt

The brown that holds everything on a model together

Under the number 69.034 you will find a medium-saturated brown with no excursion into red or yellow. In a palette for robots it is the quiet workhorse: on its own it rarely forms the main color of a machine, yet it turns up in almost every stage of one. It tones down shades that are too clean, underpins rusty traces, draws the leather straps of figures and writes itself into every crevice a surface is meant to look lived-in around.

Toning down saturated colors

The most useful trick with brown lies in adding no more than a drop to another color. A garish red shifts into the position of a real coat of paint, a bright green loses its artificial luminosity and white warms into the shade of faded plastic. An area on a model reads as more saturated in a small scale than a real surface does, and brown is the simplest way to even out that difference without resorting to gray.

• A balanced brown with no shift into red or yellow
• It tones down excessively saturated shades without graying them
• It serves as an underlying coat beneath rusty and dusty effects
• It suits leather straps, wood and the small items of figures' equipment
• A matte area accepts an oil dot filter without repelling the drops

Rust that can be layered

When building a worn machine, brown is laid down as the first story of the corrosion to come. Apply it in the places where water collects, once it has dried add a more orange tone in the middle of the patch and finally a darker shade around the edge. Three stories are enough to give rust depth; a single-color patch always looks flat, however well it has been mixed.